Scott Swanson
Of The New Era
David Helfrich knows how to get it done.
You have to when you’ve grown up in a family of eight children, you’ve won a state wrestling championship, gone on to college and wrestle at a top engineering school, and now you’re headed for a new job on the other side of the country that’s going to take you around the world.
He looks like he’s enjoying it as, fresh from graduation at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, he talks about his past and his future.
Helfrich, 23, has a degree in industrial engineering and starts July 2 at FL Smidth, a company in Pennsylvania that designs, builds and services cement plants all over the world,
“In two months, I’ll be in Denmark,” he said. “I’ll be traveling to South America, Canada, parts of Europe and Africa. It’s a great opportunity.”
It’s a result of a wrestling career that began when Helfrich was an eighth-grader at East Linn Christian Academy, getting out of school early to make it to Sweet Home in time to work out with the local junior high team.
The Helfriches had moved to Sweet Home form Moses Lake, Wash., when Dave was in the fifth grade. When his older brother Danny, who is two years older than he, started wrestling at Sweet Home High School, Helfrich got interested and joined the Mat Club.
Wrestling kind of caught on in the family, he said, though neither of his parents had been involved in athletics.
All of the five Helfrich boys wrestled for Sweet Home, the last being Rob, who just finished his high school career by finishing third in the OSAA 4A championships and fourth in the state freestyle and greco tournaments. Israel, a year older than Dave, and Tom, who graduated last year, also were top wrestlers for the Huskies.
“I’m not sure how we got into it,” he said. “Having lots of brothers helps.”
In eighth grade he won the district title “and that kind of sparked my interest,” he said.
As a freshman at Sweet Home, Helfrich found himself in the finals at districts, facing TJ Paul, a senior.
“He beat me up in the finals but I was happy I got to go to state,” he said. Paul went on to place second at state, losing in overtime in the finals.
“I was just happy to be in all the pictures,” Helfrich said.
The turning point of his high school career took place when he was back at state as a sophomore, after a fairly successful season, and was expected to place.
“I lost in the qualifying round and I remember crying in a back room or two or three hours,”Helfrich said. “That kind of lit a fire.”
Coach Steve Thorpe “was always pretty persistent in taking us to tournaments in the off-season” and that paid off, he said. “A lot of what happened in the state tournament was because of that off-season work. I placed at nationals that summer in Fargo (N.D.), and got a bunch of matches that built my confidence.”
As a junior, he defeated a Cascade wrestler in the district finals who was ranked number one in the state. In the 160-pound finals at state, he lost a “controversial, real close match,” finishing second.
“During my senior year, my goal was not to let that happen, to not keep it close,” Helfrich said. But he did lose one match in the Huskies’ last tournament before districts, “to a kid I’d pounded on earlier in the year.” He put that one behind him and finished 36-1, winning both district and state titles at 170 pounds.
Helfrich said he’d been getting some interest from college wrestling coaches and had been talking to the Stanford coach about retaking his SATs. Then Lehigh contacted him and Helfrich got interested when he discovered that the university was not only a well-regarded Division I wrestling program, but was a top-20 engineering school as well.
He and a couple of other Oregon recruits flew back to Pennsylvania to check out the program and Helfrich liked what he saw. So did Taylor Graham of Forest Grove, who also signed with the Mountain Hawks.
“I was impressed,” Helfrich said. “I was sold. It was a nice university.”
College was tough, though.
“The hardest part to adapting to college was the freedom,” he said. “That’s in wrestling and in school. Coaches and professors are there if you use them, but it’s kind of like they are resources there for you to use. It’s pretty easy to get sidetracked and I’m not saying I never did.
“I think the most important part was setting goals. I talked to Thorpe once a week when I was at college.”
The competition was stiff, too. Unlike high school, where dominant wrestlers generally don’t get challenged often for varsity positions, major college teams hold wrestle-offs weekly.
“It was pretty intense,” Helfrich said. “If you want that starting spot on a competitive team, you have to put in the time and be willing to do the work. It doesn’t happen by accident.”
By the time he was a junior, though, he was the top wrestler at 184 pounds and made the NCAA championships, where he won three matches in the consolation bracket after losing to the eventual national champion in the first round.
As a senior, Helfrich dropped to 174 pounds, his freshman weight, was diagnosed with Epstein Barr virus, chronic fatigue syndrome, and “was sleeping 12 to 13 hours a day, trying to wrestle, trying to do 18 credits of engineering” and recovering from knee surgery he underwent over Christmas.
“The year pretty much went down the tubes,” he said.
Nevertheless, he served as team captain for Lehigh and finished his four years of NCAA wrestling.
“David had and has a work ethic,” said Thorpe, behind whom Helfrich was only the second Sweet Home wrestler to move to college and complete a four-year wrestling career.
“To go to a school like Lehigh and to wrestle as a Division I wrestler – not just be on the team but be a varsity guy, a leader – that showed he has an incredible, incredible work eithic. I’m extremely proud of not only his wrestling accomplishments – that’s just minor. I’m proud of what he did with the opportunity he was given.
Thorpe noted that three other Sweet Home wrestlers wrestled in college last season, Kyle Temple and Thomas Rosa at Southern Oregon, and John Sutten at Southwestern Oregon Community College.
“That opens the door for other people,” he said. “They see what can be done.”
Helfrich said he decided to take the job in Pennsylvania because it was available and he could interview more easily there while in college. He said he likes the West Coast and hopes to move back some day.
Meanwhile, though, he is scheduled to be in Denmark in two months, then will be traveling to South America, Canada, parts of Europe and Africa.
“Getting a degree gives you so many more options,” he said. “You’re not going to lose out on anything by going to school.
He said he has built friendships he expects to last a lifetime and gotten to fly all over the United States to wrestle – to Oklahoma, Michigan, North Carolina, California and Arizona in the last couple of years.
“I would say college is a lot of work but a lot of fun,” Helfrich said. “It’s definitely worth it. It’s a part of your life that it’s hard to go back and relive. If you don’t do it out of high school, I think a lot of people have a hard time going back (after working).
“You don’t want to eat ramen noodles for five years and scrape by any other time in your life.”
Thorpe said Helfrich is coming out of college “with an incredible degree and a great job that he got partly through contacts he made while wrestling.
“We always talk about taking advantage of opportunities in our program,” Thorpe said. “He took the opportunity. He didn’t just let it slide away.